Big is beautiful for comedy actress Miriam Margolyes. Failure certainly does not frighten her and success means having another helping of smoked salmon

SUCCESS means never having to say you’re hungry, according to Miriam Margolyes. ‘I get nervous when food is taken away from from me,’ she says, firmly preventing the waiter from clearing the table. The 51-year-old comedy actress has risen in the last few years via voice-overs and BT commercials, her one-woman show Dickens’ Women and a truckful of character roles in films and television to become one of the most sought-after character thespians in the business.

She has just finished filming with Martin Scorsese (‘I was terrified because I admire him so much’) and worked with Jonathan Kaplan playing the mother in Ed and his Dead Mother, in which she plays a resurrected corpse who runs around killing people with a chainsaw. All of which means she has spent most of her time in Los Angeles, where she also recorded the BBC radio version of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I. Just released on cassette, it has proved a stunning success.

‘I’m absolutely gobsmacked – it’s between Elton John and Patsy Cline in the pop charts. The royal family come out of it extremely well, except for Prince Philip. The point of the book is that it shows up what Thatcher has done to our nation. And I am all in favour of exposing that bitch.’ It’s 15 years since she recorded the porn tape Sexy Sonia: Leaves From My Schoolgirl Diary – ‘no repeat fees there and I had to do all my own sound effects’ – though there is scant sign that she has become ‘respectable’. It is largely her wicked sense of humour, as well as her size, that has made her such a favourite on the other side of the pond.

‘You can be whatever you want in LA and I try to steer a course between the Yiddisher Momma and the Venice Beach Girl – Shelley Winters and Jane Fonda. I would say on the whole Shelley Winters wins.’

Not that she has any intentions of adopting Californian lifestyles or fads. ‘I never had any plastic surgery and don’t intend to, though I might dye my hair. I don’t believe in all this New Age nonsense. They’re very frightened over there. They’re very frightened of failure and fat. And I’m afraid of neither.’

Meanwhile, she has another tour of Dickens’ Women in Australia and a new theatre project that she won’t discuss because she is ‘superstitious’. ‘I’m on a winning streak at the moment and enjoying every minute of it. Every bit of smoked salmon tastes as brilliant as the last. And that’s what success is, isn’t it?’ she laughs. ‘Smoked salmon every day.’

STUART Carroll, 42, was head of litigation and a senior partner at Nabarro Nathanson, a leading London law firm. He ran major cases of commercial litigation – acting for disputing governments and sports and entertainments personalities. He earned a salary in the hundreds of thousands. ‘More,’ says Stuart, ‘than a chief executive of a publicly quoted company earns.’ And there he was in the glossy corporate brochure – looking serious, professional, highly motivated and dangling his glasses authoritatively. But now he’s ‘taking off’ the rest of his life. He has stopped working – forever. ‘I hated the English winters, going to work in the dark and coming home in the gloom. So I’m living on an island where the climate makes me feel alive.’

What does he say when people ask him what he does? ‘That I enjoy myself,’ he answers, sitting by his villa poolside on St Bart’s. ‘Then they ask me what I do, and I say that I live on a Caribbean island, snorkel, swim, read and lie in the sun for 12 months of the year.’ Will he never work again? ‘I think there’s a very good chance.’

Before leaving his job in March, he had been working 12-16 hour days, six days a week, jockeying between London and New York.

‘I was wishing my life away by working and being frustrated that I couldn’t do other things because I didn’t have time, or because I used work as an excuse for not doing them. I spent my time saying ‘I can’t do this, I’m too tired and I’ve got busy meetings next week’.’

HE HAS never married and has no dependents. ‘I’ve always been guilty of putting work first – to the detriment of relationships. But I’ve had relationships that have lasted a few years.’ So he decided to up and off. ‘I thought ‘I’ve got to do it when I’m young enough to keep my options open’. This isn’t a mid-life crisis and it’ll be harder to make changes as I get older. I’ve still got time to make mistakes and fall flat on my face.’ He called together the four most senior partners in the firm – with whom he had worked for 12 years – and told them he’d decided to resign. ‘I said ‘I want to live in the place I want to live in and do all the things I want to do while I’m young’.’ The partners were dumbstruck. ‘There was a great deal of shock. They didn’t want me to go and asked me to think about it.’ Stuart didn’t need to think. He sold his three-bedroom Victorian house in Richmond and decided to live off the capital and its interest. He didn’t have a car. And he didn’t mind leaving his friends. In fact, he thought he’d probably see more of them in the Caribbean. So as soon as he had completed his notice period, he jumped on a plane.

He is 6ft and work-out lean. He has the face of a hard-nosed litigator, and one that is also enquiring, intellectual and kind. He wears expensive clothes – Paul Smith, Armani and St Laurent – which now dangle disconsolately in his villa cupboards alongside his new daily clothes – swimming trunks. He’s even-tempered, reserved and solitary.

He was brought up in London’s East End. His mother was a teacher, his father an accountant. Stuart went to a comprehensive. ‘It was awful. I didn’t start learning until I was 19 when I went to Tottenham Technical College for a year to do A-levels.’ Then he did a University of London law degree. He has a first-class mind. ‘I did the Law Society professional exams on my own. I couldn’t see any point in wasting time travelling to and from Lancaster Gate when I was living in Hackney. So I borrowed the course notes off a friend who had attended – and I passed and he failed.’ AGED just 23, he went into the law and became a partner at the unusually young age of 28.

These days he lives in a huge rented villa with a maid and swimming pool overlooking the ocean. Every day he visits the patisserie, then swims, snorkels and lies on a beach with white sand, turquoise water and reefs. Then he’ll sit in a cafe, sip cafe au lait and read Emma, Wuthering Heights, Ivanhoe or Pride and Prejudice. ‘I want to read all the classics I never read at school.’

His arduous morning is followed by a lunch of fresh local fish and an afternoon of sitting under a palm tree dangling his feet in glistening water or snoozing in the gazebo. He also draws, paints, learns French, does a strenuous form of yoga (‘hanging off walls and so on’) sees friends, travels and learns the lambada. When he tires of the island, he’ll move elsewhere. ‘I feel much better about myself,’ he says, ‘I’m living a more worthwhile and rounded life. I don’t have any regrets and I feel I’m going forward.’ But he is unemployed. Does he feel a loss of identity or self worth? ‘Not at all; I’ve never been worried about status.’

STEPHANIE Cole collects relations. She discovered her twin cousins when she was 11, her father when she was 21 and her half-sister when she was 38. As if this weren’t extraordinary enough, she was also expelled from school for throwing a book at her Latin teacher, once suffered so badly from agoraphobia she couldn’t walk to the shops, and became a Buddhist. We meet in her north London flat. Stephanie, tall with a massive jaw, piercing blue eyes and stern headmistress’s face and clothes, spits out her gum, makes a cup of instant coffee with dried skimmed milk, shoos away her cats and talks in a deep, self-assured, direct voice. She is an intense, likeably formidable and surprisingly unsmiling woman.

Stephanie is 53. In her latest role as Betty, in A Passionate Woman, she plays a 52-year-old who, before her son’s wedding, reflects on her own marriage and impending old age, and sees a wasted life. ‘I empathise with her,’ says Stephanie. ‘I’ve sometimes taken stock and lost confidence.’ Stephanie recalls her life. Her parents, wartime lovers, parted before she was born. She was brought up by her impecunious middle-class mother and great-aunt, and sent, aged five, to boarding school.

When Stephanie was 11, her mother located Stephanie’s twin cousins in a bleak children’s home in Wales and adopted them. ‘The home was horrific,’ she recalls, ‘a couple of bare rooms with a lot of tiny children sitting around.’

Stephanie, aged 15, was expelled from Clifton High School for Girls. ‘For constant insubordination. The Latin mistress laughed when I said I wanted to be an actress. So I picked up a Latin dictionary and threw it at her. Sadly I missed.’ She left school, learned shorthand, and went to Bristol Old Vic drama school.

Aged 21, she decided to meet her father for the first time. ‘We corresponded then met outside the stage door, hugged, then he said, ‘Shall we have lunch?’. I was painfully shy and he was very private. But he told me I had a half-sister.’ She thinks she might have seen him again. Curiously, she doesn’t remember.

Stephanie married Henry Marshall, a writer and theatrical fight director, in 1973. She became pregnant quickly, lost the baby at five months, then became pregnant again with Emma (now a 21-year-old stage manager). ‘I stopped working and had terrible post-natal depression. I got awful panic attacks, agoraphobia and claustrophobia. The agoraphobia got so bad I couldn’t even go to Sainsbury’s – just the local shop because I could rush home. If I went to the theatre, I had to sit at the end of the row so I could get out. The panic attacks were horrendous. Your heart goes very fast, you stop being able to breathe and you get terribly dizzy and sometimes lose consciousness.’ The doctor prescribed valium. Stephanie learned auto hypnosis.

Then when she was 38, her adopted brother Peter, 28, was diagnosed as schizophrenic. ‘His behaviour had always been appalling. He’d destroy all his possessions, neglect himself, become withdrawn, and would think the television was talking to him,’ says Stephanie, who is patron of the National Schizophrenia Fellowship.

Stephanie felt spiritually empty and became a Buddhist. After five years she returned to her Christian roots, often going to Quaker meetings. On her mantelpiece she has two Hindu gods, a buddha, Christ and native Indian religious artefacts.

IN 1982, an axe handle was dropped accidentally on her head during a performance of the farce Noises Off. Consequently, she suffers from tinnitus, a constant ringing in her ears.

Then six years ago Stephanie’s marriage broke down. ‘We’d been arguing constantly and had grown further and further apart.’

Her difficulties were helped by being in analysis. Finally she spent seven years on the couch. ‘I thought the breakdown was all my fault,’ she says. ‘I came to realise it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. I explored my lovely side and the areas where I’m vulnerable, stupid, unpleasant and malicious.’

Things looked up in 1989, when Stephanie traced her half-sister through Ariel Bruce, who specialises in finding people. ‘I rang her when she was going through the dustbin. Ariel had told her I was an actress – and my sister had been to the theatre the night before and was scavenging for the programme, just in case.’ The siblings met at Gatwick airport, laughed, cried, compared life stories, realised how alike they were and became friends. ‘She lives in the States now and we talk once a week.’ Before I go, Stephanie tells me one last story. About how she set off four years ago on a mercy mission to Romania, co-driving a lorry of medical supplies. ‘The big end went, the clutch went and then the gearbox went. We were stranded and had to fly home.’ The tale is typical.

JIM Hutton was the ‘husband’ of the late Freddie Mercury for seven years before the legendary Queen singer died of Aids in 1991. Jim is talking about their ‘marriage’, being diagnosed as HIV positive four years ago, his book Mercury and Me, about watching Freddie die and being evicted from the £4 million mansion that Freddie left to his former lover Mary Austin – according to Jim, on condition that he could remain there.

Jim, who is nervous and uses his humour defensively, has bounded into the Hyde Park Hotel making jokes about putting the chandelier in his handbag. He has a rubicund face, moustache, angry eyes and receding black hair. Gone is the high clone look (white vest and jeans), replaced by a cheap looking tie and aquamarine jacket. He must have made an unlikely partner with the outrageous pop star. If you saw him in the street you’d imagine he was a suburban publican.

He and Freddie first met in a gay nightclub in 1983. ‘Freddie was slight and not the sort of man I found attractive,’ wrote Jim, a hairdresser living in a rented attic. Then he re-met ‘Freddie Thing’, as he called him, claiming not to have known who he was. Freddie promptly ravaged him. ‘When he got the urge for sex, there was no stopping him.’ Jim moved into Garden Lodge and became Freddie’s gardener.

Jim, with his Irish accent, recalls their relationship. ‘I wanted to give him a black eye a few times. But we gave each other love. We didn’t have fisticuffs, just verbal fights. Then he’d give me the silent treatment – the last time it lasted over a week.

‘The night before Valentine’s Day, we had a big fight – I don’t know why – and he was giving me the silent treatment. I got him three dozen blue moon roses. I took them to him in bed where he was with his cup of tea and two doughnuts – one for him and one for his cat, Delilah. He just grunted.’ They were, admits Jim, very different. ‘Freddie was sensitive, shy, had terrible mood swings and wanted his own way. I’m quiet and don’t have much of a character,’ Jim laughs, ‘unless you pour a few gallons of beer down me.’

He remembers happy times too. ‘Once in Germany Freddie jumped into my arms in broad daylight, in public, in a veg market of all places!’ He looks embarrassed.

Then came Live Aid, the first concert Jim had ever attended. ‘To see Freddie up there controlling that crowd … Tears welled up and the hairs on my neck stood on end.’ Did they ever actually marry? ‘Good God no. We weren’t that daft.’

Jim, the Irish Catholic son of a baker and seventh of 10 children, was brought up in a council house and left school aged 16. He claims he wasn’t impressed by Freddie, who generated over £1 billion worth of sales. ‘Freddie dealt with his fame simply. He’d give an audience his all and afterwards he’d usually go straight home and sit in front of the television.’ Jim claims he never saw any outrageous behaviour. ‘And we never discussed anything that had gone on before we met. Not previous boyfriends, childhood, nothing.’ And drugs? ‘He wasn’t snorting cocaine every night,’ says Jim, defensively. ‘He’d have gone bankrupt if he had.’

Then Freddie told him he had full blown Aids. Curiously they never mentioned the subject again. ‘It was his cross and he wanted to carry it the way he chose – without burdening me. If something came up on TV to do with Aids, we’d turn channels.’

Was Freddie ashamed of having contracted it? ‘No, just annoyed. He said ‘there’s such a stigma attached to this’.’

JIM then had a test in 1990 and found he was HIV positive. ‘When I heard, I just said ‘oh well’. That sounds flippant, but there’s nothing you can do. I didn’t tell Freddie, he had enough to deal with. I coped by going crazy in the garden, going haywire on weeding.’

Did he infect Freddie? ‘Who knows?’ Later Jim had a second test and Freddie heard the result. ‘He was lying on the couch and all he said was, ‘the bastards’.’

What was it like watching Freddie die? ‘Indescribable.’ In the book, Jim writes about the star’s deteriorating health, ending sexual relations, watching him suffer, Freddie’s last words (‘pee pee’) and how, as they lowered him back onto his bed, there was a deafening crack. ‘It sounded like one of his bones breaking … he screamed out in pain and went into a convulsion. When he died, I went into my bedroom, phoned my mother and cracked up. She couldn’t understand a word, I was crying so much.’ The funeral, Jim says, was a haze. ‘I kept saying, ‘He’s not really dead’.’ It was also the first time Mary, with whom Freddie had once lived for six years, snubbed Jim. ‘She said she didn’t want me in the first car.’ Afterwards he went home. ‘I picked up every video and CD of Freddie, played them for five hours a day for a week and cried.’

After Freddie’s death, Mary had Jim evicted abruptly from Garden Lodge. Was there jealousy between these two, Freddie’s ex-lovers? ‘I suppose if I were another woman I might have felt that. Mary loved Freddie, but, I’m sorry, Freddie didn’t reciprocate.’

Does he feel betrayed that Freddie only left him £500,000? ‘No, I feel betrayed by the people he left in charge of carrying out his wishes.’ Jim and Mary no longer talk.

Now Jim has a new ‘special relationship’ (nobody famous, this time). ‘I didn’t feel, ‘Oh I’ve got to wait a year after Freddie’s died before I can start playing the field again.’ But I don’t have sex any more (because of being HIV). I don’t miss it. I never was very highly charged sexually.’ Nor, he claims, does he think about getting full-blown Aids. ‘I’ve got to get on with life. I can’t just sit there moaning ‘how long have I got to live?’’

CLIFF RICHARD, the Nice Guy of Pop, is a man of hidden violence. A man who thinks he has the potential to commit any of the crimes he has ever read about. When he was young, he says, he might have been able to murder somebody. Sometimes he puts his hands under his bottom when people ask him questions, just to stop himself hitting them.

“I’ve sat on my hands at press conferences, trying to be the usual Nice Cliff Richard,” explains Cliff, “and when it’s over, I feel triumphant that I didn’t lam out at anyone. People start talking about your sexuality and whether you’re a homosexual (he says he’s not) and why you don’t sleep with so and so.” His voice rises stormily. “And they’re trotting me out as though I’m just a piece of something. Then I’ve been close to lashing out and hitting men.”

His envy spumes under the surface, too. “I envy other people’s success,’ he admits later. “I can’t help it. I try to control it now. But even so, I see other singers doing things and think, ‘I’m 10 times better than them’. Elton has made it in America and Clapton, too. But success there has eluded me.”

We’re talking because Cliff is celebrating 35 Top Five hits and 35 years of singing. He was, of course, meant to have been playing Heathcliff. “I was naive to think I could get it together in that short space of time, three years. Writing songs isn’t something you can do at the click of a finger.” Instead, he’s going on tour. “Some of the songs don’t have a great deal of depth. They’re just happy little songs.”

As we talk it becomes clear that the key to Cliff is self-control. Often he holds his chair as he talks. He controls his money tightly, overpowers confusing feelings with religious fervour and handles his image with metal gloves. He even curbs his ageing process and desire for food or sex. He seems sincere but self-deluded and naive.

Take money. Two weeks ago Cliff, who feigns to draw only £40 a week and is reputed to be worth £50 million, give or take, went shopping. “I found this absolutely fantastic shirt,” he says. “Then I saw its £910 price tag (Versace, natch). I said, ‘I’m really sorry, but if my mum knew this she’d kill me. I’m not buying it at this price’. And I walked out.’ Cliff, you see, respects his mum. He’s 54 and considers the impact of his behaviour on his dear mum. “She’s a very forceful person and I have to face her regularly.” And he never forgets his poverty-stricken childhood. “Why else would I be buying a second-hand Mercedes? Just because it’s £50,000 cheaper than a new one. I always have to justify everything.” In similar vein, he has been drunk “just twice” in his life. “I didn’t like being out of control.” And he has been on a strict diet for 35 years. “I eat one meal a day unless I’ve been to the gym. I always skip lunch. I think if I ate normally I would put on weight.”

Cliff, whose voice is thin and clean as well, is sitting in his office with honey, Aqua Libra and mineral water on the table. He has hair so lacquered it would stay in place in a wind tunnel, slightly tinted specs, St George’s Hill sun tan, a face as young as Joan Collins’s, and a body that is in pretty good shape for figure-hugging clothes. He’s dressed in relentlessly jazzy shirt, Star Trek badge and fawn shoes; the sort of gear you’d find in a provincial golf club at a Saturday evening social. Right now, it’s hard to tell which of us is the more absorbed with his image: me with my fierce 70-minute concentration or him with his three-decade one. He’s ‘not worried’ about getting old; just very concerned about being thus captured on film. “If I looked tired or old, I wouldn’t want to be photographed. I’m not against plastic surgery.” And what if the career of the Peter Pan of pop stopped? “If I was just a regular person who’d once had a career, I wouldn’t bother looking in the mirror so much.” HIS sex life has been equally narcissistic. He lost his virginity to Carol Costa, wife of Shadows guitarist Jet Harris, in a well-documented affair. But that was 30 years ago, and his last sexual experience. “Sex is not really my problem. Because I think I know all about it.” He laughs weakly. “I know how babies happen, if you know what I mean.” But why did he never sleep with anyone again? “I know how it all works. I don’t have to try it out all the time.”

He maintains that he doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. And that if he marries, his union will have a good chance of survival. ‘It’ll be new for us and we’ll have a greater respect for it. The evidence is that people who have slept around find it hard to have a one-to-one relationship.” But the evidence is that he finds it hard to have a relationship and it’s unlikely he’ll ever marry. “Well, you can speculate all you like about that.’ But isn’t it true that he fears commitment and wants to marry a woman like his mother? ‘Well, I would like to marry someone like my mum.”

Cliff was born in India of strict Christian parents. After Partition in 1947, his parents were forced to swap neo-colonial luxury for a council house in Hertfordshire. He grew up in spartan conditions, with the sitting-room furniture made from packing cases. His father, a dominant man, meted out corporal punishment. Once, Cliff came home saying he’d been beaten at school for something he hadn’t done. His father caned him again, saying he must have done something.

“I don’t remember it being an unhappy childhood. I can recall only that times were hard,” Cliff says. “My mum and I, when our feet were the same size, shared a pair of boots. If it was raining, either I went out or she did. Meals consisted of two slices of toast in a bowl of tea. But I don’t think of poverty as being synonymous with unhappiness.” He remembers being in a gang and stealing as a child. “It was a communal effort. We took money from a gardener’s coat and bought ice-creams with it.”

AT AYTON Castle, Lady Christine de la Rue, in red jumper and jodhpurs and wearing dusters on her feet, is skating around what appears to be 27 miles of wooden hall floor. A polishing trick she picked up at the Pucci Palace in Florence. The fire is blazing, sandwiches are laid out on the grooms’ table in the hall – where they play ping pong and do Scottish reels – and Highland terriers scamper about.

The mistress of Ayton Castle, Berwickshire, is a colourful character with a past as dramatic as her castle.

She had a three-year love affair with Prince Michael of Kent. At the time, she was married to the late Sir Eric de la Rue, a man 36 years her senior, and the Prince was a bachelor. Christine, 53, talking for the first time about the relationship which ended in 1975, looks worried. Prince Michael is still a friend. And Christine is loath to jump on to the kiss-a-Royal-and-tell bandwagon.

This expert horsewoman and Captain of the Ayton Castle polo team laughs, remembering the Prince’s reaction when first she invited him to stay in Scotland. ‘I don’t like horsy people,’ he complained. ‘Their houses are so dirty.’ Now he rides with her. And her Gothic-revival schloss, where the Prince, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia and Christopher Lee have stayed, is as spotless as a Zurich hospital.

Christine, a blonde Norwegian, lives with David Liddell-Grainger, the father of two of her children. She has been providing the Borders with society gossip for years, and has just finished writing what promises to be a compelling autobiography.

Her first marriage at the age of 19, to a Greek lawyer, was annulled after two years because of non-consummation.

‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ she says girlishly, with nervous speed. ‘I married to run away from my mother who told me I was ugly and stupid.’ With the approval of her next husband, the elderly Sir Eric, Christine scandalised local puritans by having a publicised affair with David, who was married to Anne, a cousin of the Queen. ‘Eric was spritely and a father figure but he wasn’t interested in sex after our son St George was born.’ She divided her time between the two men in what was seen – erroneously – to be a bizarre love triangle, and after Sir Eric had a mild stroke he moved into the castle with them. When Christine and David’s son David Henry was born, Sir Eric and David were at the christening.

Christine is not the hard-boiled woman oft portrayed. She’s special – delightful, shrewd, forthright and exuberantly energetic. The warmth of the castle reflects her personality.

FOLLOWING the Norman invasion, a formidable fortress was built at Ayton. When it burned down in 1836, James Gillespie Graham built the present turreted red monster which Henry Liddell, David’s grandfather, bought in 1888.

Until David was eight years old – when his father died and his mother shut up the castle – he lived here with 40 servants. It was used during the war as a girls’ school.

In the Fifties, David camped occasionally in the master bedroom, looked after by one Miss Denham. ‘She mended his long johns and cooked for him.’ After his grand marriage, with a reception at Windsor Castle, he took tons of his furniture out of storage (all had been stored easily in the castle drawing room, natch) and returned to live in the castle. David crammed his fine collection of Chippendale furniture and Staffordshire figurines alongside buys from country house sales.

When Christine moved in, the rooms were gloomy and pigeons roosted in the towers. ‘Ayton was mortgaged. No, I mean morgue-ish.’ For 12 years, Christine has been restoring the interior to its original baronial splendour. ‘David’s wife had put up dishcloth curtains.’ She has worked to a tight budget. ‘I’ve used remnant wallpaper and chosen colours to last 100 years. The dining-room round table cloths are made from old bedcovers.’ In 1990 they decided to take paying guests for £120 a night. The castle sleeps 25 comfortably and visitors can shoot and fish. They also open to the public on summer Sundays.

We do a quick tour of the castle, in less than an hour. When David is upstairs and Christine down, she rings him on her portable phone. ‘It caused great problems at the phone shop when I said I needed a model that worked inside six-foot walls.’ They probably receive long-distance bills. We speed through the dining room with its Adamesque wedding cake ceiling, table to seat an army and picture by society portraitist Barbara ‘Basha’ Hamilton. Into the drawing room which had a trampoline in it when David was young, was then turned into a shop selling cashmeres to visiting Americans, and finally decorated in 1985 for a Victor Edelstein charity dress show. Now it has overflowing bowls of hydrangeas, a grand piano and serious curtain poles. Into the library, with books piled high, family photographs and table set for a cosy dinner.

THEN a 10-minute walk to the family wing. ‘For when the revolution comes and 25 other families move in.’ Up to her second, or perhaps third sitting room where currently she’s hanging her ballgowns. ‘That’s a Victor (Edelstein), that’s Catherine (Walker).’ Into David Henry’s room with a bed for their other son Maximillian. ‘Max has his own room as well, but he likes to share.’ Off to Christine’s room with its 18th century Venetian wooden domed bed with silk hangings and cherub. Then along to her partner David’s masculine room with its single bed with two rifles by it and suitcases piled high.

PENELOPE Mortimer, who has written 11 novels, a bitchy biography of the Queen Mother, two volumes of autobiography, had six children by four men, been sexually abused by her father, attempted suicide and had lung cancer, is frightened she’ll be remembered only as the ex-wife of the creator of Rumpole, that “Ex-Wife of John Mortimer” may be engraved on her tombstone. And she resents that.

On the phone Penelope has been fierce and lugubrious. So it’s a surprise to meet a trendy 76-year-old in jeans, cardigan and cowboy boots, smoking with teenage fervour and chuckling with throaty disdain in her semi in Cricklewood.

And to find a cheerful house with conservatory, brochure for a red Mazda sports car she yearns to buy, grandchildren’s toys, and a garden (her passion) which she opens to the public.

Is Penelope going to be like Rebecca in her novel The Handyman? ‘That’s the only time I’ve ever described myself,’ she says. Penelope, who is thin and has a timorous face, pauses. ‘She’s anti-social, impatient, intolerant, always has black fingernails and grubby jeans, is impossible to live with, and a bad mother with a heart of pure mush.’ Her timidity is apparent when she speaks, her humour a defence.

Penelope contracted lung cancer in 1992. She says sardonically that she’s had ‘only half’ a lung removed. ‘I was useless for months. I just sat and felt sorry for myself. I kept hearing a little voice saying, ‘Of course she was never the same after that …” She started smoking heroically again four months later.

Does she fear death? ‘Not in the slightest, no, I’m rather in favour of it.’ But she fears dying. ‘One dreads the relentlessness of getting older and going gaga.”

Her father was an eccentric parson who lost his faith and once wrote for the parish magazine in defence of the Soviet persecution of the Church. And her faith? ‘I have no conventional religious faith. Just a sort of nudging feeling that there is more than is known.’

We talk about the second volume of her autobiography, About Time Too. ‘Now before we begin, don’t concentrate on my marriage.’ She gags, mockingly. The book is exquisitely well written and sometimes horribly witty, but doesn’t help people forget her 23-year marriage.

In it Mortimer emerges as heartless and compulsively unfaithful, regarding his wife’s grief over his infidelities with dispassionate bewilderment. It came out in hardback a year ago and she sent John a copy. She has heard nothing back. ‘If John doesn’t like something, he pretends it doesn’t exist.’ Does she regret having written it? ‘Sometimes.’ It is searingly honest and she felt exposed.

SHE writes about giving birth without chloroform in a storm. ‘I got it into my head that I would give birth without anaesthetic. It was very unpleasant.’ She chronicles having an abortion and being sterilised. ‘At the time I felt hopeful. Only the circumstances afterwards (that John had been having an affair while she was pregnant) made it seem a mistake.’ She records her overdose suicide attempt. ‘Why do people try to commit suicide? Do they really? Or is it just a big gesture?’ she says, with a smoky cough. ‘Insofar as I understood what I was doing I wanted to kill myself. I was out of my mind. I didn’t think of anything except how miserable I was and there seemed to be no alternative.’

She would have left six children. ‘That’s what is so difficult to understand now. At the time nothing occurred to me except that I couldn’t go on.’ She felt ‘ashamed’ when she awoke in hospital.

She had ECT. ‘I can find nothing in favour of it.’ Her voice rises. ‘My attitude to life can’t be altered by a few electric shocks or pills.’ And she documents her visits to psychiatrists. Was that helpful? ‘It was someone to talk to.’

Penelope is an obsessive. She writes even of John as an ‘addiction’. ‘Everything I do, I do obsessively. If I’m working, I work 14 hours a day. If I’m gardening, I garden 14 hours a day.’ How does she account for her compulsive personality? ‘God knows. Running away from unhappiness? Running to what you think of as happiness? I think it’s to do with fear. Fear that if you let up for one minute, the whole thing will disintegrate.’ There is a poignant description in the book of when she was on a US publicity tour: ‘I sat on my bed for most of the night, more frightened than I had ever been in my life.’

HAS she ever thought she was mad? ‘Once or twice it has occurred to me. I don’t really know what that means. I suppose doolally, going berserk, talking gibberish, bedlam mad. Sometimes I think I’m going round the twist.’ She writes to keep her sanity. ‘Well, a different sort of lunacy.’ Her difficulties stem from a fraught childhood. She was sent to seven different schools. ‘I never got further than fractions!’ And she had a mother whose only maternal feelings were expressed in a belief in regular meals and ghosts. ‘She was incredibly damaging, but with the best possible motives. She took my life over.’

Her mother was frigid and her father transferred his sexual attentions to Penelope. ‘Until recently I scoffed at the idea of it having affected me emotionally more than just feeling contempt.’ When she was 17, her father attempted to rape her. ‘He clumsily tried that once. Otherwise it was just messing around and petting.

“It wasn’t so much what he did, which is what any dirty old man will do, it was the shame he felt that really affected me. I mean I knew Daddy shouldn’t do this, so I despised him, which later made me always look out for the weakness in men and feel contempt for them.’

She told ‘maybe a couple’ of schoolfriends. Did she feel it was her fault? ‘Certainly not. All the time I was a child it wasn’t my fault. Maybe the last occasion, when I was about 16, it was my fault. I think it probably was. By that time I knew what he was after and my behaviour was, as it was to every man in those days, flirty. Maybe he took that as … I don’t know …’

DINAH Sheridan, star of Genevieve, The Railway Children and mother of Conservative Party chairman Jeremy Hanley, has lunched with Noel Coward, stayed with Sir John Gielgud, once had a stroke and was baptised aged 41. She’s also had both hips replaced, married four times, lost her three day- old child, had a nervous breakdown, addressed the Tory faithful and met nearly all the Royal family.

We’re talking in her Kensington flat, with two glamorous paintings of herself in the drawing room. Aubrey Ison, 78, her husband since 1992, is next door. Dinah, 74, wears a colourful Indian waistcoat, trousers and gold House of Commons pendant. Jeremy gave her a silver portcullis when he became an MP. When she married Aubrey, on her birthday, he gave her the gold one. Dinah declines to be photographed, maintaining graciously that she’s past it. (A month-old decision, this.) She produces a picture of her marriage to Aubrey, with Jeremy towering beside them. ‘We’re the two dwarves,’ says Dinah, with whistlingly perfect upper class enunciation.

Dinah has grey roller wavy hair, neatly plucked eyebrows and discreet makeup on a kindly face. She seems younger than her age, only occasionally forgetful, and is keen still to work. But her fingers are knarled with arthritis. She takes pain killers daily. ‘If I didn’t, I couldn’t get out of bed.’

She tried naturopathy. ‘No meat, fish or fowl. I became a walking soya hotpot.’ Then she had two hip replacements. ‘Surgeons say they’re second only to amputations. They’ve got to get your leg off before they can put anything in.’ Afterwards, she objected to the crutches. ‘I felt like a pissed spider. I kept falling over all my ‘legs’.’

Dinah has always enjoyed a close relationship with her children (her daughter is Jenny Hanley, former Magpie presenter). She and Aubrey returned recently from a holiday in Cyprus with Jeremy and his wife, Verna. ‘Jeremy once did a political speech and someone asked him to enlarge upon the worries of his job,’ says Dinah. ‘‘None,’ Jeremy replied. ‘My only real worry is my mother. She has 15 suitors and only one is unmarried.” Dinah, in turn, backs her son politically. ‘I canvass with him when he asks. I just stand on street corners and get soaking wet while he says, ‘Meet my mother,’ and they all say, ‘I know your face.” She canvassed in Brixton. ‘He walked the soles off his shoe and was sopping wet. I ran behind trying to get him to buy new ones. I was much more worried about my son’s feet than his getting into parliament.’

At Jeremy’s request, she addressed some of the Tory faithful at Brighton the night before the bomb. ‘I’m always terrified standing up and speaking. But I’ll always do it.’ Recently during Question Time, Frank Haynes, labour MP, roared that he’d be far happier to see Jeremy sitting there if he had half the beauty of his beloved mother. Frank then delivered a Dinah eulogy. Later Richard Luce summoned Frank to his office, in which Jeremy had hidden Dinah. ‘Frank went red with delight. No fan has ever been sweeter. He just melted.’

Dinah has just finished her autobiography. (‘I’m a typical Virgo. Highly critical, methodical, dogmatic, tidy, artistic and with a dogged determination to finish things.’) ‘I’m terribly anxious that I shouldn’t hurt or shock anybody,’ she says. ‘I feel frightened by what I’ve written. I know Jeremy is apprehensive.’She’ll let Jeremy alter her book. Dinah has many a tale to tell. In 1990 she was invited to talk at a Savoy ladies’ luncheon. After Dinah accepted, (‘Jeremy said, ‘I’ll help you with your speech”) the organisers informed her she’d be speaking after Willy Whitelaw, for 40 minutes, in front of 600 people with Princess Margaret as the guest of honour. ‘How the hell do I get out of this?’ she wrote back. The day dawned. ‘I bet you’re nervous now,’ said Princess Margaret, addressing Dinah in the receiving line. ‘I’m thinking of ducking out, M’aam,’ replied Dinah.

Once she stayed a week with Sir John Gielgud in Buckinghamshire. ‘Every day he’d appear at breakfast in a different dressing gown, twirl and say, ‘Do you like this one?” says Dinah. ‘One day he said he had a terrible confession. ‘This is the same dressing gown as Monday. I have five gowns not six.”

Above all, she’s also purged herself of husbands past in her book. ‘I’ve had a very strange life. Whenever I’ve married, I’ve married for life. But things have gone desperately wrong.’

Dinah’s first marriage was to actor Jimmy Hanley. ‘I’d adored him since the age of 12. My mother tried to point out his irresponsible ways.’ She smiles wanly.‘I just could’t manage.’ She lost a child before Jeremy was born and when the marriage broke up, Jimmy took the children and she had to work to raise the money to win them back in court.

Her second marriage was to Sir John Davis, chairman of the Rank Organisation. ‘I didn’t know the man I married. He was an incredible double character. Soon after we married, I discovered the existence of two other wives. ‘Wives numbers two and four’, he called them. He’d only told me about one and three.’ She hung on for the sake of her children. But Sir John was a physical and emotional bully who drove her to a breakdown.

During this period she was baptised and confirmed. ‘At the time I felt in need of it.’ And her breakdown? ‘I thought I’d broken my neck, I couldn’t move it. I went to a clinic for six weeks. I told the doctor I wanted to see a psychiatrist. All I wanted was to stay in the clinic.’ The doctor told her she didn’t require psychiatric help.

The true facts of their divorce didn’t emerge until years later – that Sir John was a sadist who liked dressing in women’s clothes and carried a whip. ‘He didn’t dress up,’ she says, sharply. She looks forlorn. Was he a sadist? ‘That’s not completely wrong.’

Next came the late Jack Merivale, actor. ‘Darling, adorable Jack.’ Two years into the relationship, he developed a kidney disease which required dialysis three times a week. She cared for him for 21 years, on a machine in the next room. ‘After 16 years of looking after him, I had what they call ‘good God high’ blood pressure. I’d had a tiny stroke.’

They remained unmarried for 18 years, because the accountant deemed it advantageous tax- wise. ‘One day Jack suddenly said, ‘This is silly, we’re both OAPs. Write and ask your accountant if we can get married.” The accountant replied in the affirmative. ‘Jack called Jeremy and said, ‘Your mother and I are thinking of getting married.’ ‘Oh,’ Jeremy replied, ‘I wouldn’t rush into anything if I were you.”

Now Dinah is married to Aubrey, a retired Californian businessman. ‘I hate the idea of being labelled as someone who’s had four husbands.’ They’d known each other for 21 years. ‘He and his late wife Liz stayed in the house opposite when they were in London.’ This marriage, says Dinah, is marvellous and fun.

JONATHAN Aitken’s wife, Lolitzia, was meditating for a week in an isolated Buddhist retreat when her husband rang to break the news of his promotion to the Cabinet. Lolitzia, a Swiss heiress and one of London’s most important society hostesses, was with pilgrims on Holy Island reportedly sleeping in a traditional wooden box designed to keep the body’s energies flowing. This wasn’t how we’d imagined the wife of Jonathan, newly appointed chief secretary to the Treasury, former TV-am big wig, biographer of Nixon and financier. But, speaking for the first time, Lolitzia says she spends up to two months a year looking for her spiritual ‘essence’. How does Jonathan regard these trips? ‘Maybe deep down he thinks I’m a bit cranky. But everyone has the right to be.’ She laughs. ‘I didn’t sleep in a box on Holy Island. I’m worried I’ll seem to be really wacko.’

She is hardly a traditional parliamentary wife. ‘Everybody knows I’m a really thick political wife. It’s a big joke. I don’t understand politics.’ When she’s seated next to the political Great and Good she asks them about their emotional motivations. ‘Tell me more, tell me more,’ she will giggle. Lolitzia began her quest for enlightenment 10 years ago. ‘I started returning from parties feeling something was lacking. I came home and my heart felt empty,’ she says. Initially she went to China and sought out some Chi Chuan spiritual masters. ‘I spent time with them and saw different realities. I saw them melt metal with their fingers.’

Next a friend told her about Charlie Tom, a Red Indian medicine man who lives ‘somewhere’ on a holy mountain in Oregon. Lolitzia flew to the States and simply drove to the mountains. ‘Suddenly I saw some Indians. I just walked up to them and said, ‘Hullo, I’m from London. Do you know Charlie Tom?’ One looked at me, amazed, and said he was Charlie’s cousin.’ She hoots with laughter.

The Indians invited her to an ‘extraordinary’ spiritual purification ceremony. ‘They build a tent of wet blankets, pray around it, put stones on the fire until they become very hot, throw on herbs and water and sing ancient songs. Then you dip in the cold river. I felt terrific afterwards.’ She made the next of her solo trips to see the Dalai Lama in India. ‘I had long chats with him about the essence of mind. He is pure love. He liked me for being funny,’ she says, characteristically exploding with mirth. ‘He likes to giggle. I get credit for being spiritual. But I’m just a great giggler.’

Then she was in the Caribbean when a book about whirling dervishes ‘fell’ on top of her. This led her to Istanbul where, shyly, she asked her hotel manager where she could find dervishes. ‘I whirl myself,’ he said, ‘and you must come.’ Lolitzia grabs her third cigarette, her serenity currently reliant on Marlboro. ‘I watched 10 of them whirl and whirl, bringing in divine energies.’

We’re talking in her Queen Anne terrace home – Churchill’s old house and scene of grand parties – with a dining room that could fit the Cabinet and drawing room the Government. Lolitzia – candid, ebullient but frosty when questions are too intrusive – sits talking on the edge of a table she designed. She speaks with a slightly guttural accent.

SHE’S wearing a girlish floral dress, flat shoes and clip in her hair. She has poise, friendly body language and an open youthful face, which she says radiates spirituality. ‘I’m not into face-lifts. A lot of spiritual practices are beautifying and rejuvenating.’ She’s ‘still attached’ to her vanity and won’t even divulge her age.

So would she put her money where her mouth is and discard worldly possessions? ‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ she says, sipping the strong coffee brought by her housekeeper. ‘The important thing is that you aren’t attached. I like to think that if things go wrong I could lead a simple life in a little cottage.’

Lolitzia was born in Belgrade, left aged five, and became Swiss. She had a happy childhood but was an only child. (‘I still need to be alone. I can easily go for 10 days in the country without talking to anyone.’) She studied economics, gained a masters from Lausanne university, and was then given an import-export business by her financier father. ‘Soon I started a clothes factory employing 60 people. I made a lot of money by the time I was 23. I was successful and full of ambition.’

And she was social. ‘I was very glamorous, always tarted up in couture, over-made-up and over-jewelled,’ she says. ‘It was terribly important to me to look right and be asked to the right parties, to impress people with how wonderful I was. It was insecurity. All these drives that make us want to be rich and powerful come from that hole in the heart.’

Then she met Jonathan at a friend’s, and they went out to dinner and Annabel’s. On this first date, on the dance floor, Lolitzia said to him: ‘You’re the man I’m going to marry.’ How did she know? ‘I just felt it. I just knew.’ But it took her three years. ‘I frightened him!’ They’ve now been married 16 years.

Jonathan was the Commons Don Juan, linked with women from Lady Antonia Fraser to Lady Charlotte Curzon. ‘Some people use sex to make themselves feel better. Jonathan was a love addict. I think any sort of compulsive behaviour is a cry for help.’ He had an affair with Carol Thatcher while Lolitzia was dating him. ‘I saw it as the battle lost, but not the war.’ At one stage it was reported that Jonathan nearly married Carol. ‘It never occurred to me as a possibility. I knew he would marry me.’

Shortly after Lolitzia married, she nearly died from a blood clot near her heart when pregnant. Then she was bedridden for six months before giving birth to twins – one seriously ill – who were put in an incubator for a month. Later Lolitzia had a third child by Caesarean section. ‘Now I think these problems are tests to make us stronger.’

She continued to be wildly social and had a card index of 1,000 top names in London categorised under diplomats, politicians, writers and so on. For her parties she would select evenly from the sections and send out formal invitations. But her marriage didn’t ‘fix’ her (‘I’d always liked glamorous men because I thought they would make me feel better’) and her lifestyle palled.

‘People get it very wrong when they think ‘if only I was rich I’d be happy’,’ she says. ‘You always need a bigger fix to be happy. Being a socialite became routine for me. That’s when I started looking at the soul.’

It would be too easy to mock her as a spiritual bore and sneeringly dismiss what she does as New Age claptrap, the indulgences of a rich, bored hausfrau. But she’s a sensitive, happy person – enthusiastic, praying for people who are nasty to her, philosophising about love and compassion and simply seeking to fill a void.

But what if the Cabinet new boy emerges as a powerful Tory politician? Won’t she then be a political liability? ‘I think Jonathan fears that sometimes, yes.’ The great giggler breathes in more tranquillity and another Marlboro.

ON Sunday the chocolate heir and former television chief Peter Cadbury, 76, was burgled. It was the most recent in a series of burglaries in his village near Basingstoke. He stormed that the Tories had lost his support. He demanded a crackdown on law and order, thundering that the Tories wouldn’t otherwise regain his backing.

He clamoured about young tearaways being sent on safari at the taxpayers’ expense. He got on his soapbox to the Press. That the raiders had only stolen two motorbikes (belonging to his sons) and some garden tools didn’t deter him. Nor did the thought that he’s only contributed £500 to the Conservatives this year, and only £1,000 from time to time in the last 45 years. The Cad, as he’s affectionately known, is not averse to creating a stink.

In 1986, for example, he was set to take legal action against Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles for using automatic guns to frighten the pigeons from his farmland. Peter wanted him to silence the guns. In 1993 Peter started roaring that another neighbour was using manure on his land. It stank so much he reckoned it was human sewage. ‘It was,’ says Peter, smugly. ‘The man from the Thames Water Board came round to apologise.’ We’re talking in his elegant Georgian home with squash court-sized hall, indoor pool, antique bronzes and rolling garden. His third wife, Janie, is accompanied by a great dane apparently crossed with a pony, and two lesser hounds. Janie, who sells Cabouchon jewellery at aristocratic Tupperware-style parties, married The Cad after he split with Jennifer d’Abo, boss of florists Moyses Stevens and former head of £20 million stationery chain Rymans.

The heinous crime of which Peter was victim was the ‘final straw’. The Tories should have been warned. A year ago Peter wrote complaining to his local Conservative chairman, then met up with his local MP. ‘I was fed up with the way the country was being run,’ says Peter, pucker voiced. ‘The Government’s appalling policy on law and order, wrecking of the economy by Maastricht and terrible Prime Ministerial vascillations.’

Peter was a great Maggie supporter. ‘She was also a personal friend of mine.’ And what does he think of Major? ‘An absolute disaster.’ Does he think that by withdrawing his support, ministers will take notice? ‘I’d love Major to read your article and think, ‘My God, this is serious, I must resign and take the Home Secretary with me,” he laughs. Otherwise Blair will get Peter’s vote. ‘The Labour Party is no longer trying to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak.’

Peter, fit and bronzed, wears a pale blue jumper and Gucci loafers. He looks cantankerous. But the former swashbuckling entrepreneur known for his mercurial temperament seems uncomfortable with himself and addresses most of his comments to the floor.

He has not been a lifelong Conservative. In 1945, he stood as Liberal candidate for Stroud, netting a third of the votes. ‘When asked whether I’d like to stand, I replied, ‘Yes, which party? It doesn’t matter to me,” he says. ‘I thought it would be a good mental exercise to stand. ‘I went to the adoption meeting and someone enquired whether I was in favour of the disestablishment of the Church of England. I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. At the end of the meeting I said, ‘Those are my views. If you don’t like them, they can easily be changed.’ I was very unpopular in the area for a bit because I did my canvassing in a Bentley. It was the only car I had.’

The son of the late Sir Egbert Cadbury, Peter was “brought up to play cricket’. (‘Father was a wonderful man who single-handedly shot down two Zeppelins in the 14-18 war.”) He was taught by his father to fly ‘as a boy’, and gained his licence when he was just 17. He went to Leighton Park school, a Quaker establishment founded by his grandfather, then to Trinity, Cambridge.

He was ‘very close’ to his parents and brother. But when Peter was 23 years old, his brother was killed in an accident on his 21st birthday. ‘He walked in his sleep and fell out of a window at home,’ he says, wringing his fingers. ‘My mother was by herself with him in the house in Somerset. It was terrible.’ (Years later, his father died a week before his 50th wedding anniversary. ‘It was awful. My mother felt life wasn’t worth living without him and died a year later.’) WHEN his brother died, Peter was serving as an experimental test pilot. ‘We flew the first Meteor. I had a lot of crashes. We were trying to break the sound barrier.’ His six colleagues were killed over a period of time during the war. It must have taken a lot of courage to continue when his friends were dying. ‘It was very worrying.’ He coughs defensively.

‘One day I handed the Meteor to John, a colleague, to take over. I went home. Half an hour later the police called and said a Meteor had sprayed itself over the golf course.’ He coughs more. ‘All they found of him was one shoe, no body, nothing. It’s extraordinary how bodies disintegrate at 500 miles an hour.’

After the war, Peter returned to finish his finals and was called to the Bar in 1946. ‘Not being unduly modest, I think I was very successful. But there was no real possibility of making any real money.’ In 1954 he bought the Keith Prowse group for £75,000. ‘I borrowed the money from my father. I didn’t have any.’ It went public in 1959, valued at £1million. Then he set up Tyne Tees Television. ‘I learned how much money there was in television so decided I’d rather like my own television company. I went down to the West Country with a copy of Who’s Who and a map, collected 200 shareholders, applied for a licence and started Westward Television in 1959.’ He was deposed from the now defunct Westward Television in a boardroom debacle in 1980 and then purged himself of boardroom demons by writing a 200,000-word autobiography too libellous to print. In between all this, he married three times and begat five children. Is he a difficult person to live with? He looks heavenwards. ‘I don’t think I readily accept other people’s opinions if they differ from mine.’ Why did his marriage to Jennifer d’Abo break up? ‘Because we were both entrepreneurs and she was better than I was. It hurt my pride.’

Peter made me laugh. But he’s never hidden his spleen under a bushel. Although he supports many charities, they’re mostly animal ones. Recently he adopted a gorilla in Rwanda. ‘Animals are more deserving and more pathetic than humans, quite honestly.’

IN APRIL her Putney home was gutted by fire and her furniture and possessions burned. In June she was burgled and her jewellery stolen. Then her best friend died. In July she was car-jacked and her £5,000 watch robbed; 24 hours later, she bumped into the gang who stole it. Former Page Three model Jilly Johnson, who has spoken before only about her watch theft, admits reluctantly that she’s had a run of bad luck.

We meet in The Harbour Club, tennis haunt for Princess Diana. As we walk past the bar, six pairs of male eyes, too young to remember Jilly topless in The Sun in the Seventies, follow this bronzed 40-year-old in a slashed white tunic dress with flowing blonde hair.

Jilly has brassy good looks, a big beak, an Australian twang (she lived there until she was 12) and that immediate antipodean friendliness. ‘I’m Australian in the way I’m not overly fond of wearing clothes,’ says Jilly, laughing generously. She loves to laugh at herself.

On 6 April she drove home at 5pm and was shocked to see her three-bedroom semi on fire. ‘Clouds of smoke were pouring out of the windows. I raced in,’ she says. ‘The hall was fine, I could get in, but upstairs was totally in flames.’

There had been an electrical fault and the fire had engulfed everything. ‘Anything that wasn’t destroyed was smoke damaged. I didn’t have any clothes left at all. The fire traumatised me,’ she says, with characteristic strong eye contact. She’s too upset to estimate the damage. She was renting while house hunting and wasn’t insured. She moved out and has stayed with friends since. Then her hosts were burgled. ‘All my earrings were stolen.’ Again, Jilly was uninsured. Next her closest friend died. ‘I really can’t talk about that. It wouldn’t be right.’ Then 18 days ago, a mugger yanked her by the hair and wrenched off her watch while she was stuck in a Bayswater traffic jam.

Astonishingly, Jilly was in a taxi a day later and spotted her assailant in the street. ‘I thought I was being paranoid. I’d been looking at every man I saw,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘This is too much of a coincidence.’ Then I realised he was with the gang he’d been with when he attacked me. I got the taxi to follow them and called the detective.’

THE youths were already known to the police and a man has now been charged with stealing Jilly’s watch.

‘I’m not the sort who has the vapours and gets hysterics. I’m not a wimp. But I’ve felt very nervous since that someone will break into the flat to shut me up. Yesterday a man stepped off the kerb to walk past and I leapt from my car seat.’ Her arms are still bruised and today she carries a watch attached to her wicker basket.

Jilly, the daughter of a shop fitter, became a household name when she was just 16. ‘I’d been a simple provincial girl at a comprehensive in Surrey where I was an academic desert. Suddenly I was thrust into this wild life of private jet and yacht travel, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll. I found it scary. I felt out of control.’ She remains endearingly insecure about her looks. ‘I don’t believe I’m attractive.’

Aged 19, she married property developer Brian Johnson. ‘I was searching for security.’ They divorced three years later. ‘I was far too young and we just grew apart.’ She dabbled with drugs but is wary of saying so lest she be stitched up with screaming headlines. ‘I tried pot and the odd line of coke. But I never became really involved. I always had my daughter, Lucy (now 18), to look after.’ She was also linked with zillions of famous men. Was she really that raunchy? She giggles. ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ Jilly was rumoured to have had affairs with Ryan O’Neal and Rod Stewart. ‘Ryan targeted me and was pretty difficult to dissuade. He chased me round and round a hotel room. It was so funny, I wish there’d been a camera. Finally I managed to get him to leave.’ And Rod? ‘Doesn’t every blonde with long legs get associated with Rod? I had two dates with him. He’s not my cup of tea. He’s an acquired taste,’ she says, going cross-eyed. More recently she stepped out with Eric Clapton, while he was still married to Patti Boyd. ‘Eric’s a very dear friend, I love him. But I didn’t meet him until after Patti and I never slept with him.’

But Jilly did go out with Chris Carajohn, a crook jailed in 1987 for financing his smart lifestyle with clients’ investments. ‘People told me he was dangerous which was like a red rag to a bull. I’m a desperately lousy judge of character when it comes to men.’

Much of Jilly’s love life is tabloid fabrication and the lesbianism, threesomes and gay sado-masochism in her novel Double Exposure are fictional. ‘My daughter read it and said, ‘Mummy, you’re incorrigible. Where do you get all this stuff from?” Her personal life has been ‘tempestuous’. But she’s been without a partner for a year. ‘I feel so much stronger. I’ve grown up. I don’t need a man right now.’

These days she’s ‘under house arrest’, writing her second novel. ‘All about … er, I don’t want to talk about it. I might change my mind again.’ She’s left behind modelling, pelvic-thrust dancing, singing hits, staying on a sealed floor at the Tokyo Hilton, and crumpet acting in which she was cast always with a Swedish accent and stilettos. She’s keen to reinvent herself. She doesn’t want to talk about her breasts. ‘The plastic surgery I had was a pointless superficial thing to have done. I just want to have more depth now. These questions make me seem so bimboid.’

She doesn’t regret her past. ‘Going topless is just a laugh. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.’ But she can’t fathom heavy questions about self-respect or female exploitation.

DID she really never worry at the idea of men ogling and arousing themselves over photographs of her? ‘I can’t believe men … Maybe I’m just being naive – I mean does that kind of thing turn men into rapists? I think it’s just a bit of tittivation (sic) and a British constitution (sic).’ In her nervous agitation, she produces perfect malapropisms.

THE opera singer Fiona O’Neill was eight weeks pregnant when she was driving on the M1 at 70 miles an hour and was hit by a Portuguese lorry. She was lifted into the air in her car, which then spun around before hurtling across the motorway, hitting a concrete block and landing 200 yards up an embankment.

This happened on 5 May when Fiona – who has sung at private parties for John Major and the Prince of Wales and became a household name when she stripped naked for the television film of the musical Vampyr – was on her way to perform as Madame Butterfly.

The lorry driver, in a left-hand drive, had moved lane without seeing her. ‘It was horrendous,’ recalls Fiona. ‘I remember being hit then flying like an aeroplane up an embankment, spinning and floating for what seemed like hours … I kept thinking, ‘You must keep calm because of the baby and how are they going to find someone to sing tonight?”

When Fiona landed, she noted a police car driving past in the other direction. ‘I was told later that I was so far off the M1 that the police thought I was working for the council.’ The bottom of her Vauxhall Cavalier had been ripped off.

The ambulance arrived rapidly, after she’d started having a severe asthma attack. ‘The ambulance man was trying to put an oxygen mask on me while a policeman was trying to breath-test me. The ambulance man told him, ‘You must be joking.” She was taken to Northampton General Hospital where she received treatment for a broken rib, whiplash and terrible shock. Astonishingly, she didn’t lose her baby. (Though even today she suffers migraines, sleeps too much and shakes when driving.) The next night, she performed. ‘I don’t know how I did it. My husband drove me there and I just did it. I knew I had to get going again.’ A week later, she received a bill for £20.65 for the ambulance journey – ‘I never knew you had to pay for emergency services’ – and £123.38 from the company that towed away her car.

Fiona, 35, speaks tremulously with a slight northern accent, has big green eyes, cascading hair and wears a Monsoon shirt and jodhpurs. She has sung with the English National Opera, Scottish Opera, d’Oyle Carte, been an operagram and done promotion work. ‘The whole of Opera North came through Heathrow’s Terminal Two when I was there in a maid’s uniform saying, ‘If you buy two items of duty free …” Last summer she sang at a private party in Hampshire for Prince Charles, when she was suffering from bronchial asthma. Afterwards she met the prince. ‘Oh, you were the one who sang those very high notes,’ he remarked.

FIONA hit the headlines first in 1992 when she starred in Vampyr and took her clothes off with tenor Philip Salmon for a duet in a pool. (‘A trill a minute. Watch her warble. Madame Gutterfly,’ said the tabloids.) She felt uncomfortable about the nude scenes. ‘The only way I managed was by pretending my head was the only bit that belonged to me. You just don’t look down. There are always bits of you you don’t want to see, like your thighs.’ It was particularly difficult for her because she’s an ex-convent schoolgirl, imbued with inhibitions. ‘Their idea of sex education was to say, ‘Don’t bath when you have a period,’ and, ‘You must never look at yourself in the mirror.” She is very unpromiscuous, a loner, and didn’t lose her virginity until she was 23. ‘Maybe I’m frightened of relationships. But I think I’m a closet romantic, into soppy novels and stuff.’ Before transmission, she became excruciatingly embarrassed. ‘Suddenly you realise your neighbours and the man in the pub are going to see you with no clothes on.’ She watched herself. ‘A bit like going to your own first night.’ Afterwards, she received only a few lewd comments and her mother rang. ‘She said, ‘I told you, you’ve not been eating enough.” Fiona married this year, on 29 April, a year after first setting eyes on her husband, set designer Roger Kiff. ‘I met Roger on a train, the 6.19 from London Bridge to New Cross Gate. He was sitting reading The Guardian. I thought he looked nice, wearing black.’ British Rail kept making them change platform to get back on the same train. ‘He started an ‘Oh, bloody British Rail’ sort of conversation.’

When they arrived, they stood talking for 20 minutes. By coincidence, he was building a set for the National Theatre and Fiona was working there in Baby Doll. And he lived round the corner from her. ‘A week later we went out, two weeks later he moved in with me, and a month later he proposed.’ They gave themselves time to be sure of their feelings. Then they married in Lewisham register office. ‘I wanted it to be just us and the dog, and we got permission for the dog. Then our parents seemed miserable. So we invited close family.’

When she was 18, Fiona became anorexic. How did she get through it? ‘By doing nothing about it. Everybody pretended it wasn’t happening.’ Then she started to eat continuously. ‘I put on masses of weight and went up to size 16. We just pretended it was normal.’ Still she’s conscious of her weight. ‘In the mirror I always see myself as big.’ Nowadays her compulsiveness manifests itself differently. ‘I’m a workaholic.’